


Halfway Between

by regenderate



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-12
Updated: 2019-03-12
Packaged: 2019-11-15 21:46:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18081500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regenderate/pseuds/regenderate
Summary: Jenny's radioed ahead, knows where to land, steps out of her spaceship and checks herself in as a visitor to the planet, and then she steps outside, onto purple grass, and looks around.And that’s where she sees the ghost, blonde, distant. Only half-there.--Women the Doctor almost saved, seeing the stars.





	Halfway Between

**Author's Note:**

> I noticed Doctor Who has a thing where there are a whole bunch of women who were almost saved by the Doctor but instead wound up dying and coming back/being rescued in some way that made them ambiguously immortal and/or human. At some point I'll unpack the actual societal motivation for that, but for now, take this.
> 
> This is my second work posted today. Can you tell I'm on break?

The first one Jenny meets looks like a ghost.

She’s only just set off in her spaceship, leaving the orbit of her home planet, still breathing wisps of emerald-gold light, when she sees a strange blue light through the port side window. She’s moving at thousands of miles a minute, but the blue light seems to be following her, chasing her, keeping pace perfectly.

Jenny can’t stop and take a look, as much as she wants to. She’s going thousands of miles a minute. She can only hope the blue light will follow her to the nearest planet.

Sure enough, as she enters the atmosphere of what her computer tells her is Alethen 2, she sees a wink of blue amidst the flames of reentry. She’s radioed ahead, knows where to land, steps out of her spaceship and checks herself in as a visitor to the planet, and then she steps outside, onto purple grass, and looks around.

And that’s where she sees the ghost, blonde, distant. Only half-there.

“Hello?” Jenny says, stepping closer.

“Hello,” the ghost says. Her face is expressionless.

“Are you all right?” Jenny asks. She’s not sure what to do in this situation. “Are you dead? You know, I am, too, technically.”

The ghost smiles at that.

“Yes,” she says. “I have just enough life to see the stars. I’m flying, you see.”

Grinning, Jenny sticks out a hand, even though she knows the ghost won’t be able to touch it.

“I’m Jenny,” she says. “I’m flying, too.”

“Astrid,” the ghost tells her, and she meets Jenny’s hand with her own. Jenny doesn’t feel anything, but she mimics a handshake anyway, and then she invites Astrid to come with her, on this adventure and maybe some of the others.

* * *

 

It turns out Astrid knows Jenny’s dad. Jenny mentions him offhandedly, her immortal Time Lord father with a title for a name, and Astrid says she’s met him.

“Years ago,” she says. “He said he was going to show me the stars.”

“Never got the chance?” Jenny asks. “Me, too.”

Astrid smiles.

“I can see them for myself now,” she says. “There’s so much to the universe. I’ve been exploring for hundreds of years and haven’t seen everything.”

“I’ve barely got started,” Jenny says with a grin.

* * *

 

Astrid comes with Jenny, inside the spaceship, this time. She dissolves back into a stream of blue light and flies around the cockpit while Jenny, laughing, tries to fly.

They go everywhere. They see everything. Astrid directs Jenny to some of her favorite places, and they discover new ones together. Sometimes Astrid goes off on her own, and sometimes Jenny rockets about without her, but they always meet up again eventually. 

* * *

 

They’re at an amusement park in a galaxy neither of them has visited before when they see it. Neither of them know what _it_ is at first, the strange building with its rounded edges and neon lights. Astrid says it looks vaguely like a sort of restaurant she saw on Earth a few times; Jenny just knows it doesn’t match the sharp angles and bright colors of the park around them.

Of course, neither of them can resist a good mystery. Jenny marches right up to the door, Astrid drifting behind her, and knocks three times. They wait almost a full minute until the door pops open and a woman pokes her head out at an angle, brown hair swinging as she speaks.

“Hello,” she says. “Sorry it took me a moment, I was all the way back in the library. Did you need something?”

Jenny glances at Astrid.

“We were just wondering about your building,” Astrid says. “It doesn’t match the others.”

“That’s because mine is special,” the woman says. She has big brown eyes, Jenny notices, and long eyelashes, and when she smiles, her eyes sparkle and half her mouth quirks up. “It’s not from around here.”

“Neither are we,” Jenny says.

“Want to come inside?” the woman asks.

Jenny and Astrid glance at each other and nod.

* * *

 

The inside isn’t at all what Jenny expected. From the outside, she thought it’d be some kind of restaurant, but instead it looks like a spaceship of some sort, maybe, or a highly specialized physics lab. The walls and floor are white, and in the middle is a huge column surrounded by a 360-degree control panel.

“I’ve only just gotten it,” the woman explains. “Haven’t had time to customize.”

“What is it?” Jenny asks.

“My TARDIS,” the woman says. Something about that rings a bell in Jenny’s head, but she can’t figure out where. “I stole it.”

“What’s a TARDIS?” Astrid asks.

“Stands for Time and Relative Dimension in Space,” the woman says. “But between you and me, I think they just needed a convenient acronym.” She winks. “I’m Clara, by the way. Clara Oswald.”

“I’m Jenny,” Jenny says, “and this is my friend Astrid. It’s lovely to meet you, Clara Oswald.”

* * *

 

Clara figures out what Astrid is right away-- something to do with the imprint of a teleport. She says she had an old friend who used to tell her about things like that, who had a library full of books from all over space and time.

“I’m trying to build up my own collection,” she explains. “That’s why I’m here-- this planet has some excellent universities.”

“At the amusement park?” Astrid asks.

“What, a girl can’t have some fun?” Clara retorts with a smile.

* * *

 

Clara joins them at the amusement park-- she and Jenny ride roller coasters together, and Astrid flies alongside them, a streak of blue. Clara is delighted when she sees Astrid keeping up with the coaster-- she’s arguably more excited about that than the ride itself.

The next day, Jenny and Astrid join Clara in going from university to university, looking for new books. Jenny finds a few on genetics and cloning that she buys for herself; she’s been trying to learn more about her own creation. Astrid’s been interested in speculative fiction lately; she can’t hold books herself, but Jenny went to a workshop on one of the planets they visited together and managed to rig up a page-turning device for her that works psychically. So she buys the books Astrid wants, too, and by the end she has two full bags.

Not that she can rival Clara’s collection, of course, which Jenny thinks might just wind up breaking Clara’s back. She has a stuffed backpack and three canvas bags besides.

“Good thing the TARDIS is bigger on the inside,” she says to Jenny and Astrid with a wink.

“How do you mean, bigger on the inside?” Jenny asks.

“I don’t know how it works,” Clara says. “Although eventually I’ll get some books on dimensional engineering. It’s just bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.”

“That’s amazing,” Astrid says, eyes wide.

Clara grins.

“Isn’t it?”

* * *

 

Clara invites them to go along with her, then, in her TARDIS. She can travel in time, she explains, but she’s still learning the controls, so it might be a bit bumpy.

“Although I used to fly with the most experienced pilot there is,” she says, “and he got lost all the time.”

Astrid and Jenny don’t mind getting lost. After all, it’s all they’ve been doing.

* * *

 

It takes them ages to realize that the “friend” Clara is always talking about is the Doctor. It takes them even longer to realize that Clara’s half-dead too, her heart stopped before her final breath. When they find out, they both laugh-- Clara looks offended until they explain why. It’s just such a coincidence, they say. A funny coincidence. All of them have met the Doctor, and all of them are half-dead.

Although maybe it’s not a coincidence-- after all, if you have all of time and space to contend with, you’re bound to bump into others like you eventually.

* * *

 

They go everywhere. They go back to see Astrid’s family on Sto before they died-- Astrid keeps her distance, scattered into blue light, and afterwards she cries on the floor of the TARDIS while Jenny tries to console her. They see the aurora of Broxton Maiora, and they find a planet where half the people have the faces of cats, and they get tangled up in a civil war that reminds Jenny uncomfortably of home.

They sit in the TARDIS, in the space between adventures-- Astrid and Clara don’t sleep, and Jenny doesn’t need nearly as much rest as most humans, so they just sit in the growing library. Clara’s found a sofa somewhere, and usually Jenny lies across it, her feet on Clara’s lap at one end, while Astrid floats nearby, and they talk until Jenny either goes to bed or falls asleep. (Either way, she always wakes up in a warm bed.)

“Do you ever feel like a leftover?” Clara asks one day. Astrid and Jenny don’t know what that means, but once she explains, they both agree.

“We’re what’s left when the Doctor leaves,” Astrid says, her eyes trained on the ceiling, or maybe on the stars.

“Better that than dead because he wasn’t there,” Jenny says. Clara’s told them enough stories by now that Jenny has a picture of what the Doctor does for people. He saves worlds, Clara says. (She hasn’t said it, but Jenny gets the feeling that Clara’s saved her share, too.)

“I wonder sometimes,” Clara says. “I wasn’t ready to die, but I don’t know that I was ready to be immortal, either.”

“Can’t you go back and face the raven anytime?” Jenny asks.

“I suppose,” Clara says. “But it could always be a mistake. I haven’t seen everything yet.”

“Maybe we’re not leftovers,” Astrid says. “We’ve found each other. We’re living for ourselves. I think we’re just travelers.”

“I like that,” Jenny says. “I love our traveling.”

“Me, too,” Astrid admits, a gleam in her eye.

* * *

 

It’s a few adventures after that conversation, on a crowded walkway through a forest of trees bigger around than Jenny’s old spaceship and as tall as anything she’s seen, that she feels something wet brush against her. She looks up, but the sun is streaming through the branches; she looks to either side, but she just sees a crowd of people.

But then she catches something out of the corner of her eye, and she turns. A confused Clara taps her on the shoulder, but Jenny is distracted by the two women right next to her, looking up at the trees with water absolutely dripping from every inch of their skin. Jenny taps one of them on the shoulder-- her hand sort of goes through, like the woman’s actually _made_ of water. But she turns, and Jenny realizes she doesn’t know what to say now.

Luckily, Clara’s picked up on what’s happening.

“Are you _made_ of _water_?” she asks, her face the picture of innocent curiosity.

“Sort of,” the woman says. “Not really.”

Just then, Astrid, who’s been floating above them as blue light, materializes fully next to Jenny, and the woman raises both her eyebrows.

“What’re you, then?” she asks.

“Teleportation energy,” Astrid says. “I’m sort of a ghost.”

“How’d you get that way?”

“How’d you get to be water?” Jenny asks.

“Who says I wasn’t always?” the woman retorts. “Could be a-- a water alien.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” her companion says, one hand on the woman’s arm, an affectionate note in her voice. “Of course we weren’t always water. We might not always be water, either. That’s what’s beautiful about us. We’re so temporary.”

“That’s a bit deep,” the woman says. “I’m Bill, by the way. And this is my girlfriend Heather.”

Heather smiles. She looks a little like a puzzle, Jenny thinks. She wonders whether it’s on purpose.

“I’m Jenny,” she says. “And these are my friends, Astrid and Clara. We’re all dead.”

“Me too,” Bill says, a smile beginning to form on her face. It’s not necessarily a joyous smile, or a malicious one. It’s more-- a _curious_ smile. An _interested_ smile. A smile Jenny’s seen a million times on Clara or Astrid, but not so much on anyone else. She smiles back with just as much curiosity, and Bill and Heather join Jenny, Clara, and Astrid on their walk.

* * *

 

Bill and Heather turn out to be fascinating. They’ve been traveling together for years, and separately before that, Heather says, and they have all sorts of stories. They’ve been all over the universe. Jenny can’t quite figure out the physics of their travel-- or their existence-- but then again, she’s never quite worked out how Astrid’s ghost thing works, either, or how it is that Clara doesn’t need to breathe.

She knows what’s going to happen before it does. She feels like she shares something with Bill and Heather, the same way she feels about Astrid and Clara. There’s a sort of nebulousness that they all five have, a sort of liminal existence. Hovering between life and death, traveling the stars.

So it’s not a surprise when Bill mentions the Doctor, and it’s not a surprise when Clara asks if they want to join the next adventure in the TARDIS. And it’s not a surprise when Bill and Heather agree.

They go off together, a TARDIS full of liminal women.

* * *

 

And that’s it: the five of them, traveling, seeing the stars together. They all come from different places, they all have different stories, but they love each other like a family. They've all died, or come close, and they're all still dealing with what that means, but they deal with it together. Eventually, of course,  Clara decides it’s time for her to die. Jenny feels herself, ever so slowly, beginning to age. But they pick up more stragglers, more liminal women, all of whom have fantastical stories about almost being saved, and their number waxes and wanes, throughout all of time and space.

**Author's Note:**

> I considered including River in this (she DEFINITELY qualifies as a liminal woman, which is what I'm calling them now) but I didn't think there was a great way to get her out of the computer/traveling and I didn't think she would fit into this particular found family dynamic


End file.
